While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 and Ryzen AI Max+ 395 are very similar processors just as the Ryzen PRO processors are to other non-PRO parts, one of the differences with the AMD PRO Technologies come down to AMD Memory Guard providing full system memory encryption. From the HP BIOS with the ZBook Ultra G1a there is a convenient toggle for this full memory encryption support and thus I decided to carry out some benchmarks to measure the performance cost to this memory encryption feature on this AMD Strix Halo SoC.

Back in April I published Linux benchmarks of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 with the AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 SoC. Some follow-up benchmarks I did back then that I have been meaning to publish is looking at the ACPI Platform Profile impact on performance and power for this ThinkPad laptop under Linux. Here are those numbers...

Over the past month I have been testing out the HP ZBook Ultra G1a powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO Strix Halo. Simply put: WOW! I don't remember the last time I have been so fascinated by a laptop SoC from its incredible performance generationally and even compared to existing AMD SoCs within the Ryzen AI 300 series and outright dominating against the Intel Lunar Lake for its Xe2 integrated graphics. The HP ZBook Ultra G1a thanks to AMD Strix Halo offers an incredibly potent integrated GPU and allowing up to 16 cores / 32 threads offers immense CPU performance too. HP packages Strix Halo up into a very well built, mobile workstation oriented laptop design to create an amazing laptop. It's a reliable laptop with captivating performance but does carry a high price tag but with good Linux support too except for one caveat.

PCI Express 7.0 was announced back in 2022 as coming in 2025 with 128 GT/s Since then draft specifications were published while today PCI-SIG is announcing the formal PCI Express 7.0 specification release along with a new PCIe Optical Interconnect Solution...

DAMON is a nifty data access monitoring solution for the Linux kernel developed by Amazon and other parties for system monitoring and performance/efficiency optimizations and more. But it's not so ground-breaking that it's worth enabling by default in all Linux kernel builds, Linus Torvalds has decided...

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium today published the UEC Specification 1.0 release. Nearly two years ago the Ultra Ethernet Consortium was started by Intel, AMD, Meta, HPE, and others and hosted by the Linux Foundation for open and high performance networking with an emphasis on AI and HPC...

DragonFlyBSD has updated its Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver code that it ports over from what's available in the upstream Linux kernel. The latest revision to the DragonFlyBSD kernel graphics driver code enables support for some new hardware platforms but remains woefully behind the latest generation dGPUs/iGPUs and what is found in the upstream Linux kernel...

With the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop sporting the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics it offers incredible performance potential as shown in my many benchmarks over the past month on Ubuntu Linux. But if wanting to push the Ryzen AI Max even further, with performance-optimized Linux distributions like CachyOS and Intel's Clear Linux it's possible to tap some additional performance out of this 16-core Zen 5 laptop.

In late May the Rust-written "Rusticl" OpenCL driver within Mesa landed support for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM). Following that, the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver has now seen its support merged for SVM...

With less than one year to go until the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release and trying to get any major changes into Ubuntu 25.10 for extra baking, Ubuntu engineers have been evaluating some Ubuntu Server seed changes...

With AMD continuing to be focused on their AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end for their GPU compiler needs from compute to graphics shaders, the AMD GPU/accelerator hardware support within the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" has long taken a backseat and left to third-party firms to implement. Posted today was an experimental patch providing very early support for the AMD Instinct MI300 series hardware with the GCC compiler...

The Linux 6.15 kernel cycle started off a bit rough with a heavy hitting performance regression spotted and then fixed but to only then discover another Linux 6.15 performance regression affecting modern AMD CPUs. Fortunately those issues were cleared out in time for the recent Linux 6.15 stable release. Linux 6.15 stable is looking good especially on 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" servers with some recent benchmarks showing some modest gains over the Linux 6.14 kernel.

On the GNOME Foundation blog today is an interesting post how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ended up sponsoring and powering all of the GNOME web infrastructure...

Along with releasing Linux 6.14.11 today to end-of-life the Linux 6.14 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 6.15.2 as the newest stable point release. There is a notable fix here for the CPU idle power regressing on some systems since moving to Linux 6.15...

DXVK 2.6.2 was released this morning as the newest update to this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over Vulkan API implementation. DXVK continues to be most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for running countless Windows games well on Linux...

Following last week's AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Linux graphics/gaming review for launch day, today's article is providing an initial look at the GPU compute performance for this new RDNA4-powered ~$349 graphics card on Linux with ROCm 6.4.1.

In aligning with upstream GNOME 49 expected to ship with X11 support disabled by default, Canonical announced today that the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release will also ship without support for running the GNOME desktop on X11...

Going back to last year there have been patches worked on by SUSE for upstreaming Raspberry Pi's RP1 PCI device support. It looks like for the Linux 6.17 kernel later this year that work will finally be upstreamed...

An ongoing area of work for AMD's Linux client team is on enhancing the power management and overall power savings/efficiency support for Ryzen platforms on Linux. An updated patch series was posted on Monday for making the system S5 power state handling more ideal when powering off the system...

Last year there was some ideas raised around potentially making use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring functionality for graphics drivers to help with better performance and synchronization. It turns out Qualcomm engineers have recently been exploring IO_uring use for the DRM accelerator drivers with very promising results on their Cloud AI hardware in seeing around 50% speed-ups in ioctl execution time...

Following the release of Vulkan 1.4.317 back on Friday that brought the long-awaited VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 extension for VP9 codec support for Vulkan Video, the Mesa RADV driver is now the first prominent open-source Vulkan driver merging support for VP9 decode...

As a nice stepping stone until FreeBSD 15 is ready to ship later in the calendar year, FreeBSD 14.3 stable is out today as the newest point release for this leading BSD operating system...

Going on since last year has been an effort to improve FreeBSD laptop support with backing by Dell, AMD, Framework Computer, Netflix, and others. This has focused on better WiFi driver support, enhancing power management, and other improvements for modern laptops. That work has been continuing on all fronts for improving the FreeBSD laptop user experience...

While Intel has supported CPUID Faulting on processors going back to Ivy Bridge and supported this feature in the Linux kernel since early 2017, only now the AMD support is being wired up and making use of the existing Intel code paths...

Last month with the launch of the AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" series for entry-level Zen 5 servers we ran benchmarks of the AMD EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX processors as the top-tier 16-core CPUs. They delivered an excellent combination of performance, power efficiency, and most of all value for those looking to assemble an AM5-based budget-oriented server in 2025 and beyond. Those processors destroyed the Intel Xeon 6300 series competition's flagship, the Xeon 6369P that is simply 8 cores / 16 threads in 2025... Being curious about the core-for-core performance between the AMD EPYC 4005 series and Intel Xeon 6300 series, I got my hands on an AMD EPYC 4345P as the Grado 8-core processor to see how it performs against that Xeon E-2400 series replacement as well as how the performance compares to the prior generation 8-core EPYC 4344P.

Now that the Linux 6.16 kernel merge window closed this weekend, here is a convenient recap of all the interesting features coming in this next kernel release due out as stable around the end of July.

When it comes to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux it's been primarily focused on the Snapdragon X Elite support with the X Plus SoC support not being as well off yet. But recently there has been more patches surfacing around the Snapdragon X Plus support, including the Adreno X1-45 GPU used by that lower-tier SoC...

While a point release, Mold 2.40.1 is another notable step forward for this high-speed linker alternative to GNU LD/Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold 2.40.1 brings yet more performance improvements...

The open-source, unofficial VA-API driver implementation for NVIDIA GPUs is out with a new release. The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver project continues to build VA-API support atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack to work with VA-API-only applications like the Mozilla Firefox web browser on Linux...

The turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other CPU information saw some last minute updates during the Linux 6.16 merge window...

Simon Ser announced the release of Sway 1.11 on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor from which the wlroots library was originally born...

Linux 6.16-rc1 was just released by Linus Torvalds. This first release candidate of Linux 6.16 marks the close of the two-week merge window where many new features and other changes were introduced...

AMD in cooperation with ASUS and Microsoft used the Xbox Games Showcase for announcing their new Ryzen AI Z2 series processors for gaming handhelds. The new Ryzen AI Z2 series is launching with the new ASUS ROG Xbox Ally / ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds running Microsoft Windows...

Notable with the staging area updates for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel is word that the GPIB driver code may be ready to leave the staging area in the next kernel cycle (Linux v6.17) in then being promoted to the main driver area in signifying the maturity of the code and being cleaned up to meet kernel coding standards. The GPIB drivers are for the General Purpose Interface Bus that was introduced back in 1972...

The GNOME 49 Alpha release isn't expected until the end of June but for facilitating additional testing and a number of prominent changes this cycle, a number of GNOME packages have begun releasing "GNOME 49 Alpha 0" tags as part of plans to issue multiple alpha releases this cycle. Notable for GNOME 49 are plans moving forward for disabling X11 session support by default with that code then likely to be removed entirely with GNOME 50 for a Wayland-only desktop...

This week in marking Phoronix.com turning 21 years old there was a Phoronix Premium special for those wanting to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. That special deal is ending at end of day Monday (9 June) as your last chance to hop on this special...

All of the LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel with the merge window set to wrap up later today...

The Linux Mint project published its newest monthly status report to outline various interesting development activities around this Linux desktop distribution project building off Ubuntu and Debian bases...

All of the kernel build system "Kbuild" updates were merged today for the nearly-over Linux 6.16 merge window that is expected to conclude tomorrow with the Linux 6.16-rc1 release. Notable with the Kbuild pull is the introduction of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL_FOR_MODULES helper...

NumPy 2.3 is out today as the latest release of this widely-used library for scientific computing. Notable with NumPy 2.3 is finally adding some parallelization support via OpenMP...